National Post will be running three excerpts from a new book by Lt.-Gen. (retd.) Michel Maisonneuve. In part three, he discusses his experience with being cancelled after expressing a conservative opinion.
It is September 2023. I am behind a curtain with my wife Barbara, waiting to take the stage to deliver the keynote speech at the opening of the Conservative Party of Canada’s convention in Quebec City. I can hear the emcees reading parts of our biographies. There is a buzz in the crowd of 2,500 attendees, and the speech is going to be broadcast live on television. I wasn’t really nervous, but I was asking myself, “How the hell did I get here?”
I had retired in 2018 after spending forty-six years in the military and public service. For many years, I had been thinking about the state of our country. Especially since 2015, when Justin Trudeau was elected as prime minister, I had been unhappy with the direction Canada was headed. Many things grated on me: no unifying vision, a lack of courage in our leaders, too large a focus on climate change and almost none on our natural resources, the dominance of cultural and gender issues, the decimation (again) of our Canadian Armed Forces, and the constant apologies for our history.
In 2020, I was informed I had won the Vimy Award, recognizing me as a “Canadian who has made a significant and outstanding contribution to the defence and security of Canada and the preservation of (its) democratic values.” This was considered to be a lifetime achievement award, recognizing not only my 35 years in uniform, but my subsequent decade in the public service and years championing veterans’ causes and supporting the growth of our country.
The dinner where I was to be presented with the award was postponed several times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing events continued to exacerbate my feeling of disillusionment with national affairs. Most obviously, deficit spending by the government was out of control. I felt we abandoned and ultimately sacrificed those in long-term care during the pandemic. It was unacceptable that they were dying alone, terrified, confused, uncared for and in filthy diapers, while the rest of us masked up and stayed in our social bubbles. They deserved so much better than we gave them.
There was virtue signalling of all kinds, starting with our prime minister, who had abandoned the social distancing he decreed and knelt with the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in June 2020. When criticized, he defended himself, saying, “I felt it was important for me to be part of that . . . To be able to listen, to be able to hear people and to be able to understand and to share with people how important it was to act.” How unfortunate he didn’t feel the same need to “listen and hear people and be able to understand” when the Freedom Convoy rolled into Ottawa less than two years later. Instead, he labelled those Canadians a far-right movement, a “small fringe minority of people” with “unacceptable views.” All they wanted was to be heard.
Meanwhile, the reduction of our international influence was continuing, as was the weakening of our armed forces, and the self-flagellation of our country about Indigenous residential schools, our colonial past, and our horrible history in general.
I felt our country was failing, the government was failing to lead, and I needed to take a stand. I decided that the speech at the Vimy Gala would be my platform. I saw it as a call to action and started to plan what I wanted to say. Having spent nearly five decades protecting free speech and never commenting on government policy, I felt I had earned the right to share my views on the state of our country and its future. I delivered the speech in November 2022 on a stage at the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa to an audience of some 600, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and a mix of senior public servants and executives, military officers, academics, and businesspeople.
I knew I would be speaking in the Ottawa bubble, or more accurately, a parallel universe compared to the reality of Canadians who live outside it. Ottawa is a public service city, with jobs assured, great pension plans, and a stable future, often untouched by the economic issues facing the rest of the country. In this insular environment, I hoped to ruffle a few feathers and create a dialogue between the public service, the government, and Canadians like me who had become frustrated with the direction of policy and the destruction of the very ideals and principles I and many others had spent our lives defending.
I wanted to shock people and elicit a response. What I learned that night, and in the days and weeks that followed, is how deeply the so-called woke attitudes have penetrated all facets of our society and what it feels like to be a target of that 21st-century phenomenon, cancel culture.
My cancellation began with a blog post by an academic who, although present at the award ceremony, declined to speak to me in person. The next day he ranted about my speech, calling me outdated and a poster boy for all that ailed the Canadian Armed Forces and its culture. The ensuing social media storm ended my professional relationship with a veterans’ organization I had championed. It earned me personal rebuffs from people I knew, public denouncements, and even physical threats from people I had never met. It even ended friendships.
Interestingly, and more importantly, I was astonished by the ordinary Canadians who risked their own cancellation by stepping up to applaud my words and offer their support. The National Post picked up the controversy and several of their columnists supported my views and my right to voice them. The paper printed my speech and invited me to elaborate on what it called my “anti-woke” opinions. This was the first time a headline branded me “the anti-woke general.” The response was overwhelmingly supportive. The gratitude expressed by many members of the Canadian Armed Forces, from all ranks, touched me more than I can say. Many thanked me for saying things they could not and asked me to “keep talking.”
We Canadians are a complacent people. As former Canadian politician Sheila Copps said, “Canadians are generally a cautious lot . . . we are the world’s neighbours and just about everybody’s friends. We do not push our way to the front of the line and probably say ‘sorry’ and ‘excuse me’ more than any other nation on earth.”
Maybe this complacency comes from living next door to the greatest democracy on earth, believing we are safe under its nuclear umbrella. Sometimes, though, it feels more like apathy, as if we just couldn’t give a damn. We have little personal opinion about important issues. Someone once told me that, compared to the US, we never put big issues on the table and debate them. We prefer evolution, slow as it needs to be, instead of revolution. Perhaps this is because our nation was born not of revolution but evolution, with the Fathers of Confederation discussing and eventually creating the first association of provinces.
The U.S., by contrast, was created via a bloody revolution and bound with one of the most important documents of history, The Declaration of Independence, a statement that guarantees its citizens equality, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and obliges its citizens to defend those rights. It’s an obligation that generations of Americans have taken seriously, thus becoming the defenders of the free world.
Not surprisingly, my name was mud with the federal Liberal government. Several of the organizations that publicly cut ties with me received all or much of their funding from that government. Even the blogger who started the cancellation was receiving federal grant money. However, within weeks of my speech, members of both the Conservative Party of Canada and the People’s Party of Canada reached out to see if I would run as a federal political candidate. All this led to an eventual meeting with Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and a request to deliver the keynote address at the opening of the September 2023 CPC convention with my wife, Barbara, who is also an armed forces veteran.
I will not go into politics. I’m too old and I don’t have the energy or the staying power to put up with all the polarized, binary thinking, the bad-faith arguing, and the torrents of dogma.
When word got out that we would be speaking at the convention, we heard again from the same academic who had started the cancellation process. In an article published in the Globe & Mail, he accused the CPC of politicizing the military. I decided to write what I believe was a thoughtful rebuttal and contacted the Globe to see if they would print it. Surprisingly, it was declined by the Globe opinions editor; so much for airing both sides of an issue.
I still do not believe I was (or am) politicizing the military. I have been retired from the public service for more than five years and hung up my uniform more than seventeen years ago. I believe I am entitled to state my views, even if they do not please everyone. Many of my retired colleagues in the senior ranks of the military are happy to live out their retirement. I would be lying if I haven’t wondered at times why some who could take a stand do not.
Our current trajectory as a country seems to me to be downward. Canada, with its almost infinite natural resources, its tolerant and diverse population, its glorious history and endless potential, could be a true world player, capable of great things and leading in the most important areas. But to do this, we need leaders to excite national confidence and pride throughout our population. We need to stop apologizing for the past and judging history by today’s standards. We need to make Canadians believe in our potential and help them realize it. And we need to harness this potential and put it to use to help Canada and the world prosper. Meekly going along with the government of the day, letting it carry on regardless of its lack of vision, and simply acquiescing to whatever underwhelming proposal is brought forth can no longer be tolerated. We need outrage! We need ordinary Canadians involved! We need to be heard! And we need a government that will motivate us to be all we can be, so that Canada can truly be all it can be.
We need Canadians to emerge from this bubble with open eyes and ears, to experience this amazing country and the wider world, and to participate in society. We need Canadians to have opinions, we need them to discuss these opinions without fear of ridicule or cancellation, and we need to expose them to other opinions so they can flex their muscles of tolerance and understanding. And, as I have said often, we need Canadians to vote.
Excerpted from “In Defence of Canada: Reflections of a Patriot” by Michel Maisonneuve, now available from Sutherland House.
Read Part One: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream sacrificed on the altar of DEI.
Read Party Two: Meritocracy, not wokeness, badly needed in Canadian Armed Forces